Music therapy has shown its benefits for health, both on a physical, psychological and emotional level, but, in addition, it can also positively influence the developing fetus, since a study has found that babies whose mothers sang or listened to music with Daily speakers during pregnancy have a greater brain capacity to encode the sounds of language.
The findings have been published in Developmental Science and provide relevant data on the impact of prenatal music exposure on speech stimuli from a specific brain response: the neonatal frequency-following response (RSF). FFR), a neurophonic auditory evoked potential that reports proper neural encoding of speech sounds.
The research was directed by Professor Carles Escera, head of the Brainlab-Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group of the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Barcelona, the Institute of Neurosciences of the UB (UBneuro) and the Sant Joan Research Institute of Déu (IRSJD), and associates daily musical exposure during the last weeks of pregnancy with a better encoding of low-frequency sound components, which could improve the perception of pitch by the newborn.
Effect of prenatal exposure to music on infant hearing
The frequency tracking response (RSF) is conditioned by various speech and language impairments, and has been shown to be affected by the fetal environment and the prenatal acoustic environment as well. For this reason, the authors of the study propose that this measurement could be used as a biomarker to detect the risk of language disorders and adopt preventive measures in the early stages of life.
“Those children who present an attenuated brain response, for example, babies born with normative underweight, could benefit from a musical intervention program”
The work is based on the comparison of RSF records in 60 babies who were born between 12 and 72 hours before, of whom 29 had been exposed to music every day during the prenatal period, while the other 31 had not. experienced the musical exhibition. The researchers analyzed the encephalogram recording of the babies to two different speech stimuli: the stimulus /da/ –the most used in research with FFR and newborns–, and /oa/, with which it is possible to analyze the coding of frequencies to which the newborn has been exposed in the womb.
The results showed that daily exposure to music during the last trimester of pregnancy is associated with stronger encoding of speech stimuli. Prenatal exposure to music is associated with fine-tuned encoding of the fundamental frequency of human speech, which may support early language acquisition and processing. “Musical stimulation reaches the auditory system with low-frequency rhythmic components that train it to organize neural plasticity,” says doctoral student Sonia Arenillas-Alcón, first author of the article and member of the Brainlab-Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group.
“This is only the first step towards a specific clinical application after the necessary follow-up studies”, says Professor Carles Escera. “Thus, those children who present an attenuated brain response, for example, babies born with normative underweight, could benefit from a musical intervention program.”
The study has had the collaboration of the expert Lola Gómez-Roig, head of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu in Barcelona and a researcher at the Sant Joan de Déu Research Institute (IRSJD), and the researcher Teresa Ribas-Prats (UB-UBneuro-IRSJD), who had already worked with this technique in a previous exploratory work in 2019.
Source: University of Barcelona
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